


a blanket, the lights, and the sky

by skuls



Category: The X-Files
Genre: College AU, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-06
Updated: 2017-04-06
Packaged: 2018-10-15 06:25:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10551586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skuls/pseuds/skuls
Summary: two college students, truth or dare, and a light in the sky.





	

Scully’s flopped over his desk chair, writing furiously. She's managed to steal both his sweatshirt and his glasses, and there's a splotch of red on her cheek from where she's been resting it on her hand. They'd agreed, somewhat, to study in his dorm room because it was quieter (his roommate transferred in the second month of the school year), but Mulder's gotten little to no amount of work done. He has an article on a recent UFO sighting, highlighting up and down with neon green. “Hey, Scully,” he says. 

She chews on her pen. “I have three pages left, Mulder.”

“Could you hand me the file on UFO sightings?”

She sighs heavily,  reaches down and yanks open his drawer and pulls out his overflowing files (which are really just grimy manila folders kept from bursting open with rubber bands; he has an organization problem).

Balancing the folder on his pillow, Mulder flips through the crumpled sheets of lined paper until he finds what he’s looking for. Yep, just like he thought. “Hey, Scully, can you take a look at this?”

“ _ Mulder _ ,” she hisses, shoving the glasses up her nose. “Three pages!”

“This'll just take a minute.” 

She sighs again, nods reluctantly.

There's no other chair, so he sits beside her, their thighs pressed together. Scully scoots so they can sit somewhat comfortably, shoving her textbooks aside with annoyance so he can set his paraphernalia down. “Look,” he says, tapping his scrawl. “Here, last year, there were recorded lights in the sky, seen in the month of January, every night in this field. Same place. I talked to some people who saw them last year, and they have the same description in this recent article.”

Scully raises an eyebrow, sliding her finger down the newer, highlighted article. She leans closer to read it better, and her hair brushes his cheek. “Lights, huh.”

“Do you think it could be a repeated occurrence?” he asks, leaning closer, too. “Annual abductions?”

“Whatever this is, it  _ might _ be an annual occurrence,” she says. “Maybe. Although I'm not sure I'd call it an abduction. It might just be some idiots with a flashlight.”

“A planned flashlight phenomena? Seems more unlikely than my abduction theory.” Their knees bump together as Mulder reaches across her into his drawer, pulling out his grubby file on UFO sightings. Scully makes a face, swatting his arm. “I don't know how you find anything in here,” she says, slightly disgusted. “It's such a mess.”

He scribbles down some new notes, clips them to the article, and stuffs them in the file. “It's still January,” he says, lifting his head to look at her hopefully.

She's already shaking her head. “Mulder, it's almost  _ midnight, _ ” she says firmly, standing with her books and going to sit on the other bed. It’s a bare rubber mattress, punctuated only by a solitary sheet draped over it like the corpse of a cartoon ghost.

“It's Friday!” he argues. “Live a little! Aren't these supposed to be our partying years?”

“First of all, I'd hardly classify going out into a dark field, looking for improbable UFOs, as ‘partying’. And second of all, I've had late classes all this week, and I'm exhausted.” She fixes him with a glare from behind the glasses lens.

He feels slightly guilty. “You're right,” he says. “Maybe you should get some rest.” She makes an approving sound, already wrapped in her books. “So we can go looking for the lights tomorrow.”

She throws up a balled-up piece of notebook paper at his head. 

“Come on, Scully, what else are you going to do on a Saturday night? And  _ don't  _ say study.” He’d call her a square again, but the last time he did that, she punched him. (In the ribs.)

She shrugs aggressively, shoulders looking smaller in the sweatshirt. “I don't know… maybe spending it in a way that won't make me have to spend my Sunday cleaning muck off my shoes. For  _ once _ .”

He pouts a little at her, spinning the desk chair around. “And you'd leave me alone to go look for UFOs in the cold?”

Scully flips a page silently. 

“What if I got  _ abducted _ , Scully? You’d never forgive yourself.”

She writes something down, ignoring him studiously.

He sighs, defeated, and goes back to the new things Frohike had sent over in a thick, Sharpie-smeared envelope, telling himself that he's done this by himself a thousand times before he ever met her, and he can do it alone again. They work quietly for another half hour before she speaks. “Will you ask the Gunmen if we can borrow their car? I'm tired of the cold. And we're stocking up on food beforehand, because I always get hungry on these things.”

He tries to hide his delight, saying, “Sure,” casually as he shoves aside his stacks of paper. Scully's sliding her books into her bag and pulling on her boots. He can hear the wind blowing hard outside. “You can stay here, if you want,” he offers. Off her raised eyebrow, he adds, “It's late, and you live halfway across campus, and the dean never comes down this way… There's some extra sheets and blankets in the closet, I could take the empty bed and you could have mine.”

She smiles a little behind her hair, half-amused. “I'll be okay. But thanks for the offer.” Pulling her shoes on, she comes over to him at the desk and sticks his glasses on his nose, her fingertips brushing his cheek briefly. “Night, Mulder,” she says softly before leaving the room, letting the door bang shut behind her. 

He doesn't realize until later that she's stolen his sweater. Whether or not it was on purpose, he doesn't know.

________________

They’d first met at the beginning of last school year, when they’d been partnered up for an assignment in their Intro to Folklore class. Scully (Dana, then) had been agreeable enough at first, but it hadn’t taken them long to start arguing over  _ everything _ . (He’d gotten to a point where he’d suspected that she was disagreeing with him just to argue with him. He’d called her Scully because she hated it.) 

Things had come to a head one day when they got into an argument so loud that the librarian had kicked them out of the library. Face flushed red with embarrassment, she’d stood with her shoulders hunched up and her arms wrapped around herself on the stone steps, and demanded why he believed in all these things. 

“Because my sister was abducted by aliens,” he’d replied, straight forward. “And I’ve been looking for her for years.” 

He’d expected her to say something about how there was no way that was possible in her usual snarky know-it-all voice, so he walked off before she could. She didn’t, though. She showed up at his dorm room an hour later, face still flushed to a point where he could count all of her freckles, but with a different kind of embarrassment. “Fox,” she started.

“Mulder,” he said, leaning against the doorframe. 

“Mulder,” she corrected. “I’m… sorry for what I said. I shouldn’t have assumed…” 

“Everyone does. It’s fine.”

She shook her head, determined. Her eyes stole over his shoulder. “Is that your sister?” she asked, and for a minute he genuinely thought he was being cruel -  _ ooh, made you look! _ \- until he remembered the picture on the corkboard over his desk and followed her finger to it. 

“Yeah, that’s her,” he said. 

Scully nodded, shifting her bag on her shoulder. “Listen, Mulder,” she said awkwardly. “I don’t want our… disagreements to interfere with our work.” 

“Let me guess… something about getting a good grade?”

She looked annoyed. “Something like that. But also because I’ve… enjoyed working with you.” She seemed halfway embarrassed to say it. 

He had enjoyed working with her, too, but was even more embarrassed to say it back. So instead he motioned her into the room. “Have a seat,” he said. “My roommate won't be back til later, and I think we're still not allowed in the library.”

She smiled a little and came in, sitting in his desk chair and leaving Mulder to take his roommate’s. She made a face every time he called her Scully, but there came a point where she didn't seem to mind.

They'd mostly been study partners, at first, until the semester and their shared class had ended. He'd half-expected her to stop hanging out with him, but she'd shown up at his dorm room on the second day of the second semester and asked if he wanted her to look at those ghost sightings he'd shown her before break. So they'd remained friends (he calls them partners and she rolls her eyes, but he can tell she is pleased), and had begun spending more and more time together. She was sympathetic to his search for his sister, even had offered to help him, which was more than most of his high-school friends had done. (He'd cried in front of her, one time, half drunk on the tail end of a bottle of wine, crashed on the couch in her student lounge, and she'd wrapped her arms around him, just holding him in the dim hours of morning. She understands why he searches the way he does.)

(She'd fallen asleep in his bed once, slumped against him and his pillow while they'd reviewed for a test. He'd looked down at her and then had to look away. His chest ached. He wasn't supposed to fall in love with her.)

________________

A pre-med student and a psychology major can't afford a car (Scully doesn't have time for a job, and Mulder's too absorbed in his search and school to focus on it), so the two of them walk to the Gunmen’s ratty apartment in the early evening. Scully shivers in the wind as they go, knit hat pulled down over her bright hair, and Mulder avoids the urge to put his arm around her. He offers her his coat instead, and she rolls her eyes and refuses while her teeth chatter like chiclets. 

The Gunmen (two college dropouts and a student who had originally just been their roommate until after a brief fling with a nameless woman and an insane weekend that the other two undoubtedly blow out of proportion as an epic, dangerous adventure where a massive conspiracy was discovered) are Mulder's sole contacts, a trio of hackers who publish an underground magazine and provide him with sources. He'd introduced Scully to them a couple of months ago, and although she'd spent most of the encounter making her I Don't Believe This face, she'd admitted she'd liked the guys after they'd left. He himself is a frequent visitor, as they're the only friends he has outside of Scully.

Frohike only buzzes them up after a detailed questionnaire (“Something about making sure I'm not a clone,” he'd said to Scully on their first visit, and she'd looked astonished). He's expecting them to be crowded around laptops and piles of papers as usual, but when they clamber through the front door, the three of them are sitting in the living room, and Langly is in the midst of shouting something at Frohike. “Mulder!” Frohike says good-naturedly when he sees them. “Dr. Scully,” he adds in an attempt to be sauve. (He'd nicknamed her that when she'd introduced herself as pre-med, clearly infatuated with her.)

“Hi, Frohike,” Scully says. “We came by to borrow the car.”

“You're more than welcome to it, if you join us in our game,” Frohike replies smoothly. 

“Do I even want to know what that means,” she says in a deadpan. 

“Truth or dare, actually,” Langly says. “You should play, daring these two to do stuff is getting boring.”

“Yes, because I love playing games that were popular at my middle school lunch table.” Scully crosses her arms.

He has a sudden, fleeting temptation to make her stay and play this stupid game. “Come on, Scully, let's play,” he says, pulling at her elbow.

She stares at him incredulously. “Mulder, you can't be serious.”

“Hey, remember what I said about living a little? Time to pay your dues, Scully.” He tugs her with him to sit on the couch. 

“But… I thought you wanted to go look for the lights!” she protests, her voice rising a couple of octaves.

“Ehh, it won't even be dark enough for a couple hours.” He grins at her, and she sighs wearily and collapses on the couch beside him. Byers exchanges a sympathetic look with her. (He's in the middle of a giant bag of Cheetos, which Mulder assumes is some sort of dare because of the way he continues to gloomily eat them until the bag is empty.)

The game goes on for almost an hour, and Scully seems to loosen up a little as the game goes on, taking pleasure in making the guys look like idiots when it's her turn to ask someone. She methodically picks truth every time, though, and the Gunmen seem to get increasingly irritated at it. Finally, Langly hits her with the defining statement of the evening: “It's time for a dare, Scully, you've been dodging them all evening.”

The irritated look is back, and she huffs, leaning back into the cushions. “Fine,” she grumbles. “But I don't want to eat anything weird. I'm certain that most of you are gonna end up with food poisoning by tomorrow.”

“Well, that takes all the fun out of it,” says Mulder. 

Langly gets something of an evil look on his face. “Kiss Mulder.”

Frohike makes a sound somewhere between a choke and a cough. Mulder wants to crawl under the couch and die, just a little. Scully looks a little embarrassed. “What?” she says distantly, tugging on her ( _ his _ ) sweater sleeves. 

“Kiss Mulder,” Langly says innocently. “For at least 5 seconds.”

Mulder chokes on his drink.

“This is ridiculous!” Frohike protests, his voice cracking. “Didn't… didn't we make a no-kissing-rule at the beginning of the game?”

“She said no eating anything weird, I don't know what else that even leaves!”

“A ton of things!” Frohike insists, grasping desperately for excuses. “Prank calls… Byers, wanna help me out here?” 

All four of them look at Byers, who raises his orange-smeared hands in the air innocently. “I… I plead the Fifth.”

“Fine,” Scully snaps, making all the heads in the room snap towards her. “Fine, whatever.”

Mulder finds his voice, suddenly, as she turns towards him on the orange couch. “Scully,” he says softly. “You don't have to…”

She seizes his face in both of her hands and kisses him suddenly. Hard, her mouth hotly searing his. She probably only meant her it to be brief, but he cups the back of her neck, her hair soft under his fingers.

He pulls away suddenly, turning to face the Gunmen. “That's five,” he says. Scully is breathing unevenly. 

“More like fifteen,” Langly mutters under his breath. Byers elbows him.

“You guys ready to hand over the car keys?” Mulder says loudly. Frohike nods numbly, standing to go get them. Mulder follows. Behind him, Scully is thanking Langly and Byers for the car, a slight bite in her voice. He isn't sure if it's because she didn't want to kiss him like that, or she didn't want to kiss him at all. 

“I don't think you have anything to worry about, Melvin,” he says in a low voice. 

Frohike shakes his head gravely. “I think I have everything to worry about, Mulder,” he says, passing him the car keys. “Have you seen the way she looks at you?” Mulder swallows, squeezing the keys so that the serrated edge bites into his hand.

“Are you okay, Mulder?” Scully asks when they're out in the car. He's not looking at her so he doesn't know if she's looking at him, but she sounds sincere. He knows she's got that hat back on, is powerfully adorable, wants to kiss her again. 

“I'm fine,” he says, starting the car.

________________

They've been in the car for a couple of hours, listening to a baseball game. Scully makes a joke about that day in the fall when he'd taught her how to hit a baseball, and Mulder laughs, but less enthusiastically than he normally would. He can't stop thinking about the kiss. He has no idea how she feels about it, she hasn't said.

He watches the sky, the stars. She dozes, burrowed under a blanket that she'd insisted on bringing even though the heat is all the way up. 

“Mulder,” she says suddenly (softly, sleepily). “About what happened tonight…”

“We don't have to talk about it,” he says, too quickly. “I'm sorry I made you play, I didn't know they'd embarrass you like that… I'm so sorry. But we don't have to talk about it.”

“Mulder,” she says again, and she sounds more awake now, shifting in her seat to sit up. His fingers tap absently on the wheel. Her voice is warm: “What if I  _ want _ to talk about it?”

He turns to look at her, astonished, but she's suddenly not looking at him; her eyes are fixed straight ahead, wide. “Mulder, look,” she says, hushed.

He turns, and gapes at the lights dancing on the horizon. They're  _ there,  _ the best proof he's had since Samantha's abduction, and they're coming closer. 

“ _ Shit, _ ” he says, fumbling for the door handle. “Sorry, Scully, I have to…” 

“Mulder, wait, what if it's dangerous…”

The door swings open and he almost falls out of it. Scrambling to his feet, he turns towards the lights eagerly. They are coming closer. “Scully, you've gotta see this!” he shouts, and then reconsiders. He can live with getting abducted, looking for his sister, but her...

“Mulder!” The car door slams shut behind him. He starts to call her name back. The light comes up in his face, blinding him. For a second, he thinks he's lost her, like his sister, and he was an idiot to bring her out here because now he's lost her forever, but then her small, cold hand sneaks into his and holds on tight. His ears are ringing. 

And then it's over, gone, and Scully is standing behind him, shivering and the wind whipping her hat-frizzed hair around his face, and she says, “What the hell was that, Mulder?”

And he turns to face her, to tell her it was aliens, a UFO, Aurora borealis, the moon coming down to take a better look at them, because the possibilities are endless now. But instead he kisses her. And she kisses him back.


End file.
